Jim Bugwadia on why finding a Kubernetes problem is only half the battle for Kyverno users

Graduating within the CNCF marks a major milestone for an open source project, signaling not just technical maturity but strong governance, security practices, and widespread adoption. Kyverno, a Kubernetes policy engine, reached this stage after five years — becoming only the 35th project to progress from sandbox to graduation. As co-founder Jim Bugwadia explains, incubation reflects production readiness and adoption, while graduation validates the project’s long-term sustainability and governance rigor. Originally built to help teams manage Kubernetes complexity through declarative policies, Kyverno has evolved alongside the ecosystem. Its shift to the Kubernetes-native Common Expression Language (CEL) and rising demand driven by AI workloads have expanded its user base beyond regulated industries to mainstream enterprises. With over three billion downloads, it underscores the growing need for automated policy enforcement across development, security, and operations teams. Commercially, Nirmata maintains a clear boundary between open source and enterprise offerings, focusing on remediation and advanced management. While only 2–5% of users convert, that small percentage becomes meaningful at Kyverno’s scale. Learn more from The New Stack around the latest about Kyverno: Simplify Kubernetes Security With Kyverno and OPA Gatekeeper Using the Kyverno CLI to Write Policy Test Cases Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.

You can listen to Jim Bugwadia on why finding a Kubernetes problem is only half the battle for Kyverno users online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Jim Bugwadia on why finding a Kubernetes problem is only half the battle for Kyverno users is an episode from The New Stack Podcast by The New Stack Podcast.

This episode is 00:23:06 long.

This episode was published on Apr 23, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from The New Stack Podcast when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.